Rick's b.log - entry 2016/12/02

Day Two

Will David Pilling be first? Will anybody else be second? ☺

Fire at the recycling centre

One of the many varied tasks I have at work is to take opened cans of food to the local recycling centre. To put this into context for you, the tins are catering size, so are about the size of those beer kegs you can buy in the supermarket, and there's maybe 600 or so. They are in plastic crates, and I can pick them up with a manual "pallet truck" (that's Google's translation, sounds American to me). It's the thing you might see products brought out on in supermarkets, that wheeled thing where you crank the handle and it lifts the pallet. Since the recycling centre is close to where I work, I can just trundle the crates down the pavement aways, and I'm there.

After a while, this happened:

The person in charge of the recycling centre, and another man (the guy who raised the alarm) bravely tried to put out the fire by chucking buckets of water into the skip. Unfortunately it was the "encombrants" which is where plastic, fibreglass, and all of that sort of stuff gets put. So as you can imagine, it didn't take long to go from that to this:

The picture is blurry as I hung around long enough to take a zoomed photo, then I got the hell out of there.

The woman in charge of the recycling centre, who I'm friendly with, said to me that a man came and tried to dump hot cinders in the "déchets verts" - garden waste. She noticed this and flew down to stop him, and put out the stuff that was already smouldering. While she was occupied doing that, he apparently went and dumped the cinders into the skip that later caught fire.

You know, I can't help but shake the feeling that this was arson. I know that is a serious accusation to make, but think about it. Who the hell empties cinders out of their fireplace at half three in the afternoon, immediately puts them into a car, then takes them directly to the recycling centre when they are still hot enough to set stuff on fire. It doesn't make sense. So either we have somebody stupider than a Brexiteer or this was done on purpose.

It got worse, but everybody was evacuated by then, and the heroes turned up shortly afterwards.

The black smoke rapidly turned white as the fireman swiftly dealt with the problem.

A black truck, sort of like a Range Rover with pretensions of being a Hummer, pulled up. A man was looking impatient, so I went to tell him what happened. Oh my god. Talk about an inquisition. He wanted to know where, how, why, was anybody injured, how big the flames were, and so on. This guy was really off the scale creepy. So much so that I am wondering if he's more than just a small-time disaster fanatic. I mean, how big the flames were? WTF?
The man himself - large glasses that were slightly crooked, round face, an erratic matter of speaking with long pauses and then all the words crashing into each other, and a slight accept like he lisped as a child. If it wasn't for the fact he was speaking French, I'd have totally believed that I was speaking to Milton from Office Space (the stapler guy - and guess what he wanted to do...).

After pulling the rubbish apart to check nothing was going to start another fire, they packed up and departed. Smile guys. There's always some asshole with a camera, and for this event, t'was me. ☺

Your comments:

Please note that while I check this page every so often, I am not able to control what users write; therefore I disclaim all liability for unpleasant and/or infringing and/or defamatory material. Undesired content will be removed as soon as it is noticed. By leaving a comment, you agree not to post material that is illegal or in bad taste, and you should be aware that the time and your IP address are both recorded, should it be necessary to find out who you are. Oh, and don't bother trying to inline HTML. I'm not that stupid! ☺

You can now follow comment additions with the comment RSS feed. This is distinct from the b.log RSS feed, so you can subscribe to one or both as you wish.

This web page is licenced for your personal, private, non-commercial use only. No automated processing by advertising systems is permitted.
RIPA notice: No consent is given for interception of page transmission.